ZCash/ZEC GPU mining

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poofyhairguy

Lifer
Nov 20, 2005
14,612
318
126
Have you tried running an instance per GPU (with .exe renamed and in a different directory)? That's the way I do it (2x290 + 1x480), but then I only have 3 cards so it's easy.

Funny thing is, it's not like before where some cards mine and some don't. Instead Claymore hangs right before it recognizes the cards. None of them mine, it's a complete failure.

You give me hope though. Maybe the issue is the 2GB 370 instead of the 4GB 460.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,583
10,785
136
Did ZEC get hit with a huge difficulty increase in the last 24 hours? I am at maybe 72% of my earnings potential without changing total Sols/S compared to yesterday, and the ZEC price doesn't seem to have moved that much.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,583
10,785
136
I've been testing Optiminer 1.4.0 vs Claymore 11.1 .

Claymore 11.1 likes to crash on my Win10 box in numerous "interesting" ways. Sometimes it causes a driver crash on my admittedly-flawed 290. Sometimes it takes down the entire machine with a THREAD_STUCK_IN_DRIVER crash. Either way, it isn't terribly stable.

Running Optiminer 1.4.0 vs Claymore 10/11, I get maybe + 60 Sols/S running Optiminer according to the miner output. I'm waiting for a proper 6h analysis to see what the pool has to say about it. BUT! But. Running Optiminer in the background while playing a game drops performance to 470-570 Sols/S for reasons I can't quite fathom. That's gaming on a 7870k's iGPU that is not used in mining.

Under Linux, Claymore 11.1 is producing superior results on my R9 270 but generally-inferior results on my 290s and 390s. It's sort of a wash on my box with 3 290s and a 270. I haven't tested Optiminer 1.4.0 on my other Linux machine that has 290s and 390s only.

The experimental Optiminer kernel for Pitcairn (such as my 270) produces better results than Claymore, but there are a lot of errors causing the 270 to fail to find any shares. It isn't worth using at this time.
 

thilanliyan

Lifer
Jun 21, 2005
11,848
2,051
126
Yeah, optiminer is better on my 290s and is consistently better pool side for some reason, even taking into account the devfee on claymore.
However for the 480 I found claymore is better so I use that. Running v11.1 and it is very stable on win 10.
 

Shmee

Memory & Storage, Graphics Cards Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 13, 2008
7,382
2,419
146
I tried Optiminer on my Fury/290 system, seems to be a bit better than claymore's with the latest drivers. Getting about 300 S/s + 350 S/s
 

Shmee

Memory & Storage, Graphics Cards Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 13, 2008
7,382
2,419
146
Nice. Notice any power consumption differences?
Cannot say for sure. I have not mined in that system in a bit now. As for the 1070, a small update is that the EWBF cuda miner is now version 3.0. About the same as with 2.0 so far, getting about 450 Sol/s with my OC.
 

MrTeal

Diamond Member
Dec 7, 2003
3,554
1,658
136
I'm going to be moving at the end of March, and I'm looking to sell off most of the reference 290s I bought last fall. My local buy/sell market isn't nearly large enough to absorb that for people looking at gaming cards, are there any Eth/ZEC specific forums where someone might buy a half dozen cards at a time besides Bitcointalk?
 

oakmaster

Junior Member
Dec 25, 2016
1
0
6
I'm going to be moving at the end of March, and I'm looking to sell off most of the reference 290s I bought last fall. My local buy/sell market isn't nearly large enough to absorb that for people looking at gaming cards, are there any Eth/ZEC specific forums where someone might buy a half dozen cards at a time besides Bitcointalk?
How much where you looking to get I may be interested in a few

Sent from my LG-K540 using Tapatalk
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,583
10,785
136
You can probably move them in the AT For Sale forum. We have plenty of savvy buyers around here.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,583
10,785
136
Claymore 12.0 is out, and my Hawaii cards are flying higher than ever.

MSI Gaming 390 @ 1040 GPU/1400 VRAM: ~375 H/S
Reference 290 @ 1000 GPU/1300 VRAM: ~314 H/S

Under Win10. Haven't upgraded my Linux machines to it yet. Also Zcash difficulty crashed for some reason, so my profits are way up despite ZEC dropping to ~$31

edit: I think DASH going up to the $20 mark and the rise of ETH to $13 may have taken miner focus off ZEC.
 

thilanliyan

Lifer
Jun 21, 2005
11,848
2,051
126
Claymore 12.0 is out, and my Hawaii cards are flying higher than ever.

MSI Gaming 390 @ 1040 GPU/1400 VRAM: ~375 H/S
Reference 290 @ 1000 GPU/1300 VRAM: ~314 H/S

Under Win10. Haven't upgraded my Linux machines to it yet. Also Zcash difficulty crashed for some reason, so my profits are way up despite ZEC dropping to ~$31

edit: I think DASH going up to the $20 mark and the rise of ETH to $13 may have taken miner focus off ZEC.

I was getting ~350sol using optiminer on a reference 290 at 1075/1250.
I then flashed a 390x bios to the 290, and now I can get 380sol at 1000/1250 using Claymore v12. Best thing is that the card runs 3-4C cooler than before.

You might wanna give those 390 bioses a look.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,583
10,785
136
Possibly, though I have already done so much BIOS h4xx0ring that I am not sure I want to do any more. I might do it to this one card for funzies.

Also most of my flashing was for ETH mining. It didn't show as much bias towards 390s for some reason.
 

Shmee

Memory & Storage, Graphics Cards Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 13, 2008
7,382
2,419
146
Version 3.2b is now out for EWBFs cuda miner.
 

PhonakV30

Senior member
Oct 26, 2009
987
378
136
my card is XFX 290 double dissipation.Claymore's ZCash AMD GPU Miner reports 241h/s
.It's low for current card ? also on Minergate , I see it's 220 Sol/s.
 

thilanliyan

Lifer
Jun 21, 2005
11,848
2,051
126
To get high speeds on 290s, you have to flash a 390/390X BIOS onto them. Google it. Be careful because you can brick your card.
 

thepaleobiker

Member
Feb 22, 2017
149
45
61
Claymore 12.0 is out, and my Hawaii cards are flying higher than ever.

MSI Gaming 390 @ 1040 GPU/1400 VRAM: ~375 H/S
Reference 290 @ 1000 GPU/1300 VRAM: ~314 H/S

Under Win10. Haven't upgraded my Linux machines to it yet. Also Zcash difficulty crashed for some reason, so my profits are way up despite ZEC dropping to ~$31

edit: I think DASH going up to the $20 mark and the rise of ETH to $13 may have taken miner focus off ZEC.
Thank you for the guidance in the Ethereum thread/forum! :) How do you feel ZEC is today for mining? I'm starting up by building a simple wooden case (the youtube standard video, 36in square wooden dowel etc)

3 RX 480 4GBs (mixed manufacturers, basically the cheapest ones from local Microcenter)

I'm debating between ETH & ZEC (31st Mar 2017) ZEC is at $71 (stable) while ETH is at $48 (falling) . Currency calculators still show ETH mining to be more profitable. Would you advice the same? Thanks in advance! :)

Regards,
Vishnu
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,583
10,785
136
ZEC is doing quite well for mining. Difficulty is staying low, and profitability nearly doubled about a week or two ago when would-be ETF investors discovered crypto and began pumping various coins. ZEC saw a value spike. Most mining attention has gone back to ETH which is fine for us ZEC miners. Since I hold ETH, I mine ZEC and buy ETH to (subtly) drive up the value of my ETH holdings.
 
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thepaleobiker

Member
Feb 22, 2017
149
45
61
ZEC is doing quite well for mining. Difficulty is staying low, and profitability nearly doubled about a week or two ago when would-be ETF investors discovered crypto and began pumping various coins. ZEC saw a value spike. Most mining attention has gone back to ETH which is fine for us ZEC miners. Since I hold ETH, I mine ZEC and buy ETH to (subtly) drive up the value of my ETH holdings.
That's really insightful - is there a particualr workflow you have found to make the miner --> ZEC --> ETH transition simple for you? (pools to a particular exchange/wallet) I have started to earn a few fractions of ETH via my solo RX 480 gaming machine (that's currently taking baby steps in mining duty) but I wasnt able to fully figure out how I'd send the mined amount (ETH or ZEC) directly to a wallet/exchange. This has to be done manually later on, am I right? Please correct me if not.

Regards,
Vish
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,583
10,785
136
I have my main rig run mining software to a pool - nanopool. If I want to do a price comparison, I compare the $/month of mining ZEC to whatever I would earn through the same pool mining ETH (I run 6 hours for an average). Every time I make the comparison, I wind up winning with ZEC. Though I have not tried it recently.

I mine ZEC directly to Poloniex, and then I make the exchange there. You can trade ZEC -> ETH directly without having to mess around with BTC. Then when I have some amount of ETH stored on Poloniex, I send it to my ETH wallet.
 
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thepaleobiker

Member
Feb 22, 2017
149
45
61
I have my main rig run mining software to a pool - nanopool. If I want to do a price comparison, I compare the $/month of mining ZEC to whatever I would earn through the same pool mining ETH (I run 6 hours for an average). Every time I make the comparison, I wind up winning with ZEC. Though I have not tried it recently.

I mine ZEC directly to Poloniex, and then I make the exchange there. You can trade ZEC -> ETH directly without having to mess around with BTC. Then when I have some amount of ETH stored on Poloniex, I send it to my ETH wallet.

Thank you, again! Do you see potential for eth to move upwards of $50-60? There's quite a few upcoming crypto currencies. I've been reading up a little. It's still rather nascent.

I should read up your guide on zEC mining via Ubuntu , but I was wondering if it's still the same process given recent updates. I think you're very correct about win 10 random reboots :( Linux would be much more stable in that respect.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,583
10,785
136
ETH is generally pretty stable. I was not expecting it to get this high, this soon, and I also anticipated that it was possible that it would never crack $40 due to the large volume of ETH in circulation (as opposed to deflationary crypto like BTC).

When ETH cracked $50 recently (and then retreated to maybe $45, before returning to $49 where it sits now), it made me realize that it has the potential to go much higher after PoS. Though I am hesitant to make many predictions in that regard.

Failing any major negatives from the Vitalik and company, I do not expect it to drop. Every time whales try to drive it down, "bargain hunters" jump in to buy more and bolster the price. There are a lot of crypto investors out there that are keeping it above the $45 mark just on instinct.

There is also the really weird possibility that ZEC and ETH may merge once Vitalik's crew implements zk-SNARK into the Ethereum code base, which he has said that they will do. It's only a matter of time. We just don't know how long.

The ZEC guide is still basically accurate, it's just that you will not want to use Ubuntu 15.10 at all with 480s. I would recommend 16.04 with AMDGPU-Pro. Be sure to set it up to login automatically at startup rather than forcing you to login manually . . . that will make automation easier.
 
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PhonakV30

Senior member
Oct 26, 2009
987
378
136
I'm doing undervolt XFX 290 double dissipation for Zcash, here SS :
rg7.png


minimum Voltage Is ok ? I don't see any Error in Miner.average = 312 to 331 h/s.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,583
10,785
136
Only thing I see "wrong" is your GPU temp. Don't mine over 75C for extended periods if you can avoid it. Can you try to undervolt a little?
 

PhonakV30

Senior member
Oct 26, 2009
987
378
136
only if I reduce clock to 900mhz and stuck at 76'c.among all 290/290x Series cards , XFX 290 double dissipation is probably worst cards in term of cooling.